It is a remarkable claim because the last figures that I found show that solar PV plus wind generated only a tiny fraction of total energy compared to fossil fuels. So I would doubt that solar PV and wind suddenly could replace all coal, oil and gas in just a couple decades. Two decades seems like an awfully short time to go from (almost) zero to hero.

That made me really curious about the principle behind this claim. To clarify their case, the authors showed two graphs. This is the first one:

The website that Verity references, ‘theconversation.com’ should be renamed ”theconversation_for_the_ impractical.com’. By their method all of modern life would have to be scheduled and time-tabled by the huge intermittency of these ruinable electricity generators.
And remember that from refinement of materials through manufacture to final decommissioning these sources of electricity are an overall loss maker (unless you know of a method of using these solar farms and windmills to make more solar farms and windmills).

The propaganda is working on some people. Witness the proliferation of solar and wind installations on YouTube. The craze has even taken hold in the RV market. These are not people who are satisfied with a single PV panel to maintain a single storage battery while not RV’ing. They’re adding 3-400 lbs of lead-acid storage to a trailer/motorhome that usually only has ~1000 lbs of cargo capacity, gluing or taping panels to their roofs, and wind turbines that are attached to the thin exterior sheething or access ladder with no guying.

The prevailing wind speed across most of the US is15MPH or less. The toy wind generators they’re buying cannot produce full output in less than a 30MPH wind, and who wants to vacation where the wind is that strong? (Rips the entrance door out of your hand and buffets the RV to one’s lack of sleep.)

I have not read of a single person performing a cost-benefit analysis in any dwelling sector and estimating a break-even ROI in terms of total wind days or clear solar days. One fellow had 690AH of battery storage that cost at least $1K and was anxious to see what a 14MPH wind would do with his 400W turbine to bring them up.The life of those batteries will not exceed 6-7 years just sitting, and far shorter when doing the idiotic thing of running the RV’s A/C unit off them. In my mind it is money thrown to the wind if an installation cannot stay ahead of maintaining the storage cells over life, plus deliver the expected power service. But there seems to be a lot of believers who never put pen to paper before spending a dime, nor seek out “off-griders” who abandoned their site after a few years of turmoil to learn of the pitfalls.

My retired EE professor brother even suckered up to a $50K PV installation. His house sets on the west face of the mountain range, limiting sun exposure to <6 hrs/day, while the region is notorious for cloudy days and overcast at least half the year. His wife wanted to know if it would be paid off before they died….

Last night I watched an hour long video doc of the founder of California Power who spent large sums of investor money developing a vertical axis wind turbine that supposedly achieved 30% efficiency! The first experimental generator was destroyed by a wind storm while being installed. What I want to know is how the design fares in tornado alley. Oh, and let's not denigrate the effort because it still only captures 50% of the theoretical wind energy. When it runs. And only useful at full tilt.

US renewables firm takes Poland to court over U-turn on windmills
By AFP

PUBLISHED: 16:18, 24 April 2018

A US renewable energy group Invenergy said on Tuesday it had begun international arbitration against Poland, claiming it stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars (euros) after the EU country reneged on its commitments to build wind farms.
. . .
Last year, it pushed through legislation limiting existing subsidies for wind farms and imposing tight restrictions on the construction of new ones.

Critics, including Invenergy, argue such measures make it virtually impossible for wind farms to turn a profit or for new ones to be built.

It is worth reading all comments at The Conversation post. Professor Blakers makes some totally unsupported statements with ease. Regarding their “extrapolated” graph, I saw it before: in the book Limits of Growth, courtesy of the Rome Club. (When I say Rome Club, does anybody envision a working class or a middle class?)

For that to work it will require 100% of capacity (kW) as inverters and batteries along with enough battery capacity (kW-hr) to run for the longest possible outage of wind and sun. Since winter can be long in Canada and Alaska, months of low / no sun, and wind can be calm for weeks to months, that’s going to be a LOT of batteries.